Grace of Monaco, the much-discussed biopic starring Nicole Kidman as Hollywood actress turned European princess Grace Kelly, has met the cruelest of Hollywood fates.
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The film, which ignited a storm of controversy at the Cannes Film Festival, and was publicly panned by the Monegasque royal family and film critics, will bypass cinemas and instead premiere on US cable TV.
The cable channel Lifetime, which is pitched at a predominantly female audience, has bought the US rights to the film and plans to screen it on the Memorial Day holiday weekend at the end of May.
The deal means the film bypasses its theatrical window and will not be released in US cinemas.
The film had a limited international release in cinemas, but its poor reception is believed to have contributed to the decision to send it straight-to-cable in the US.
Such a move is roughly analogous to being sent "straight to DVD", an outcome usually reserved for low-budget films and umpteenth sequels.
For a film with such a high pedigree - backed by Hollywood heavyweights Bob and Harvey Weinstein, and starring Kidman - it is a particularly brutal fate.
The film's distributor, The Weinstein Company, had planned to release the film in US cinemas in November, 2013, and then March, 2014.
After it was met with shocking reviews at Cannes, the film was pulled from theatrical distribution indefinitely.
The film, set in 1962, stars Kidman as Grace Kelly, later Princess Grace of Monaco, Tim Roth costars as her husband Prince Rainier III, Frank Langella as the priest Father Francis Tucker, and Paz Vega as the opera singer Maria Callas.
The Monegasque royal family, headed by Kelly's son Prince Albert II, and including her daughters Princess Caroline and Princess Stephanie, issued a statement saying the film "in no way constitutes a biopic."
Instead, the statement noted, "it recounts one rewritten, needlessly glamorised page in the history of Monaco and its family with both major historical inaccuracies and a series of purely fictional scenes."
In 2013, the film's director Olivier Dahan issued his own statement, saying that he was neither "journalist [nor] historian. I am an artist. I have done, in any subjectivity, a human portrait of a modern woman who wants to reconcile her family, her husband, her career".
